Engaging Ideas - 1/13/2017

Every week we curate stories and reports on complex issues. This week: The perfect setup for a natural experiment on the minimum-wage’s economic effects. Point-counterpoint on ideological perspectives and education research. Gaps in New York’s free-college plan. And clues about where health care prices come from.

Democracy

Obama
used his farewell address to issue 5 warnings about US democracy (Vox)The
president named five specific threats he said he felt American democracy was
currently facing: economic inequality, racial tensions, polarization, foreign
threats, and decaying democratic institutions. “How we meet these challenges to
our democracy will determine our ability to educate our kids, and create good
jobs, and protect our homeland,” Obama said.

Promoting
democracy is bipartisan (The Hill)The
tremendous challenges that the United States and the world face can only be
confronted through a mixture of vigorous democratic debate, as well as
relearning the art of bipartisan cooperation and compromise. It was in this
spirit that the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National
Democratic Institute (NDI) came together last month to host a bipartisan
celebration of our common quest to help build the architecture of democracy
worldwide.

3 Steps
to Digestible Citizen Engagement (Bouldin Labs, via Medium)The
goal is not to make these decisions seem uncomplicated and obvious. It is
important that citizens see that there are many factors in play and that
supporting one area may mean making a painful cut someplace else. Part of
building public trust is displaying complexity so that there is a shared
understanding when cuts do need to be made. Presenting this complexity in a
simple way will help citizens understand the tradeoffs and give actionable
feedback about their preferences.

Opportunity

Let the
great wage experiment begin (Crain's New York)Economists
are smiling at the minimum-wage increases that have just swept across the
country. It's not because they favor the measures, though most do. It's because
they will now be able to settle one of the most contentious issues in their
field: Do minimum-wage increases cost jobs or not? New York will play a key
role in answering that question. The numbers are eye-opening. Nineteen states
increased their minimum wages around Jan. 1—seven because they adjust their
wage floors based on inflation; the rest because of new legislation or ballot
measures. It is the largest number of increases ever when the federal minimum
remained unchanged.

K-12 Education

Education
Research Needs a Policy Makeover (Education Week)Carolyn
Sattin-Bajaj, a professor at Seton Hall University, writes: Education
researchers must engage in debates across the political spectrum. The recent
emphasis in higher education on interdisciplinary, multi-method research has
not included a similar push for the inclusion of multiple ideological
perspectives. The tendency to work with scholars who concur on political and
policy-related questions contradicts evidence about the value of diverse
perspectives for improved decision making.

Higher Education & Workforce Development

More
Transparency in Higher Education Will Help Improve Student Outcomes (U.S. Department of Education)The
Department announced a roadmap to support researchers in accessing
appropriately protected student aid data for these kinds of studies. That
includes partnering with the Federal Reserve Board through an “Advancing
Insights through Data” pilot project to study student loan repayment plan
selection and the relationships between income-driven repayment plans and
outcomes like student loan defaults. They’re also working with researchers to
better understand their needs and inform the creation of a privacy-protected,
public-use microdata file from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS)
that can facilitate valuable research and other studies of higher education.
The Department plans to have conducted researcher engagement and announced the
outcome of those discussions by October.

Community
Colleges Rethink Remedial Education (KALW.org)The
California Acceleration Project is working with about two-thirds of the state’s
113 community colleges to create more accelerated remedial math and English
programs, and shorten the amount of time students spend taking classes that
don’t count for college credit.

Infrastructure
Plan Would Create Many Jobs That Require Some College(Community College Daily)Almost
a quarter of the new jobs would go to people with postsecondary vocational
certificates, industry-based certificates or some college but no formal degree,
according to the analysis. More than a fifth (21 percent) of them would go to
managerial positions for highly educated workers with two-year, four-year or
graduate degrees. More than half would go to high school graduates or dropouts,
but many of those jobs would require some formal or informal on-the-job
training.

Is it
time to shake up traditional learning, employment pathways?
(eCampus News)Traditional
learning-to-employment pathways are becoming a thing of the past, and educators
and employers should instead focus on supporting competency-based approaches to
education, training and hiring. The case for a different focus comes from
Innovate+Educate, a national nonprofit that works to create new employment
pathways. The nonprofit released a new paper that makes the case for
competency-based education.

Health Care

Health Care’s
Bipartisan Problem: The Sick Are Expensive And Someone Has To Pay (The
Wall Street Journal) Congress
has begun the work of replacing the Affordable Care Act, and that means
lawmakers will soon face the thorny dilemma that confronts every effort to overhaul
health insurance: Sick people are expensive to cover, and someone has to pay.
... If policyholders don’t pick up the tab, who will? Letting insurers refuse
to sell to individuals with what the industry calls a “pre-existing
condition”—in essence, forcing some of the sick to pay for themselves—is
something both parties appear to have ruled out. Insurers could charge those
patients more or taxpayers could pick up the extra costs, two ideas that are
politically fraught.

We
Asked People What They Know About Obamacare. See If You Know The Answers. (NPR)But
many of those surveyed in a new NPR/Ipsos poll got it wrong. About half
believed that the number of people without insurance had increased or stayed
the same, or they said they didn't know what the law's effect has been on
insurance coverage. That was a failure of communication on the part of the
Obama Administration, says Bill Pierce, a senior director at APCO Worldwide,
who advises health care companies on strategic communications. "They
needed to use the president more," said Pierce. "If this was his
number one achievement, and something he was proud of doing, it was the kind of
thing that he needed to be out there and talking about all the time."

It’s
Hard To Be A Small-Time Family Doctor These Days, New Data Shows (The
Washington Post) The
price of health insurance just keeps going up. Until recently, though, a
crucial part of how those prices are set was invisible to the public: the
negotiations between doctors and insurance companies that determine how much
patients are charged. The story of that contest, carried on fiercely behind
closed doors for decades, is now partially in public view, and the new data
contains tantalizing clues about where prices for health care really come from.